Month: October 2015

A planet-forming disk with mysterious ripples

11:40 am

cropped image of dust disk and ripples

The mysteries of science: Astronomers have detected ripples and blobs moving outward through the dust disk surrounding a nearby star, and have no idea what is causing them.

The images reveal a train of wave-like arches, resembling ripples in water. After spotting the features in the SPHERE data the team turned to earlier Hubble images of the disk, taken in 2010 and 2011. The wave-like nature of some of these features were not recognized in the initial Hubble observations. But once astronomers reprocessed the Hubble images they not only identified the features but realized that they had changed over time. The researchers report that these ripples are moving — and they are moving very fast. “We ended up with enough information to track the movement of these strange features over a 3- to 4-year period,” explained team member Christian Thalmann of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. “By doing this, we found that the arches are racing away from the star at speeds of up to 10 kilometers per second (22,000 miles per hour)!” Co-investigator Carol Grady of Eureka Scientific in Oakland, California, added, “Because nothing like this has been observed or predicted in theory we can only hypothesize when it comes to what we are seeing and how it came about.”

The one theory that is still not refuted is that the star’s flaring activity, which is significant, causes the ripples somehow.

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Yale makes available online 170,000 photographs from WWII period

9:34 am

History: Yale University had posted online 170,000 Library of Congress photographs taken in the United States from 1935 to 1945.

The photos come from all over the U.S., and can be accessed with this easy-to-use inactive map. They also used the original captions, thus avoiding any editing for politically correct reasons and allowing the viewer to get an honest feel for the time period.

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China launches first commercial Earth-observation satellite

9:21 am

The competition heats up: China today successfully launched its first Earth-observation satellite for providing commercial images to the public.

A Long March 2C rocket launched the Jilin 1 satellite constellation, which consists of a primary high definition optical satellite, as well as two Lingqiao video satellites and a fourth, LQSat, to test space technology. Xuan Ming, from the Chang Guang Satellite Technology Co., Ltd, earlier told Xinhua the satellites will focus on providing images to commercial clients, while helping with harvest assessment, geological disaster prevention and resource surveys. Jilin-1 is reported to be capable of very high definition images, boasting a resolution of 0.72m with a pan-chromatic camera and a 4m resolution multi-spectral camera.

The article also provides a short but nice summary of China’s space plans for 2016, including its first manned mission since 2013.

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Another Google Lunar X-Prize contestant announces launch contract

8:59 am

The competition heats up: Another Google Lunar X-Prize team, SpaceIL, has announced the signing of a launch contract, this time as a secondary payload on a Falcon 9 launch in the latter half of 2017.

Their press release says they are the first to produce an actual contract to the contest, which only means the Moon Express contract hasn’t yet been delivered.

This two launch contracts suggest that the competition for the X-Prize will get interesting in 2017. As a secondary payload, SpaceIL will not be able to schedule its launch. And while Moon Express, as a primary payload on smallsat rocket, can schedule its launch, it is depending on a new untried rocket, Electron, being developed by a new untried rocket company, Rocket Labs.

And since SpaceIL is an Israeli company, be prepared for some Muslim and leftwing heads to explode should it win the X-Prize. How dare they oppress those Palestinians by getting their rover to the Moon first!

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Government workers earn 78% more than private workers

5:29 pm

We’re here to help us! A new study has found that Federal employees earn 78% more than private sector workers.

The Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards compared data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis to show that, in his view, civilian federal workers are overcompensated. Factoring both salary and benefits, Edwards pointed to BEA data showing the average federal employee earns about $119,000 annually, compared to the private sector worker who earns $67,000 per year. When comparing just salaries, feds collect 50 percent bigger paychecks, Edwards said.

The wage gap between the federal and private sectors has grown since the 1990s, Cato’s director of tax policy studies found. The divide has doubled since 1990, when it was just 39 percent. The growth, he said, came from not just raising pay levels and offering more generous benefits, but also a more “top-heavy” bureaucracy that routinely moves employees into higher salary brackets and redefines jobs as higher earning positions. “The federal government has become an elite island of secure and high-paid employment, separated from the ocean of average Americans competing in the economy,” Edwards wrote in his findings.

I wonder, do you think we are getting our money’s worth?

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An avalanche on Mars, as it happens

4:49 pm

Avalanche on Mars

Cool image time! In their routine monitoring for avalanches at the layered deposits at the Martian north pole, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter science team captured the avalanche on the right, as it happened.

This picture managed to capture a small avalanche in progress, right in the color strip. … The small white cloud in front of the brick red cliff is likely carbon dioxide frost dislodged from the layers above, caught in the act of cascading down the cliff. It is larger than it looks, more than 20 meters across, and (based on previous examples) it will likely kick up clouds of dust when it hits the ground.

They note that avalanches in this area of Mars are common in the spring when things are warming, and have been documented previously, but possibly not so dramatically.

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Guess where?

3:12 pm

Pluto lake

I found the image on the right while trolling about on the various raw image sites for NASA’s planetary missions. No press release yet, and maybe there never will be one. I do know the scientists involved in this particular mission are right now drooling over the details available in the full resolution image, which I have cropped and reduced to fit on the right. Take a look and you will drool as well.

Want to know where this is? I bet you have already guessed, but if you need help, click on the “read more” link below, where I have also added some comments.
» Read more

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IPPC replaces head with economist

2:34 pm

The politics of climate science: The IPCC has selected an economist, Hoesung Lee, to replace the disgraced railroad engineer, Rajendra Pachauri, who had previously been its leader.

That neither Pachauri nor Lee is an actual climate scientist, nor have they ever even done any climate science, tells us all we need to know about the IPCC. It is a political body, designed to push the political agenda of the advocates of human-caused global warming regardless of the scientific evidence. And that political agenda has nothing to do with science or climate, but using science and climate as a tool to impose Marxist fascist rule on everyone.

And if you doubt me, read this article in the science journal Nature describing the possible directions the IPCC will take under Lee’s leadership.

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Ramp down in sunspots continues

12:59 pm

Correction! For reasons I do not understand, the graph below, originally posted on the NOAA website, was incorrect and was changed several days after I posted my piece below. See this post for the correct graph and analysis.

The uncertainty of science: On Monday NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, showing the Sun’s sunspot activity in September. Once again I post it here, below the fold, with annotations to give it context.

For the third month in a row the sunspot count dropped a tiny amount, lingering at about the same number as the previous two months. Moreover, the rate of decline seems to have transitioned down from the 2009 prediction (red curve) to the 2007 weak prediction (lower green curve). This doesn’t real mean much, as the sunspot number can still vary up and down considerable before we reach solar minimum in two or three years.

» Read more

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What Facebook “likes” reveal about the candidates

9:32 am

A review of the number of Facebook “likes” obtained by the Republican presidential candidates illustrates again that the grassroots strongly desires something different in 2016.

Candidates perceived as part of the “establishment,” such as Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich, Lindsey Graham, and George Pataki had surprisingly few followers considering their name recognition and experience. My initial research revealed Jeb Bush had the most followers amongst the establishment candidates -right at 280,10 at that time. Comparatively, Dr. Carson, was leading the pack among the “outsiders.” He had 3,821,488.

However, all of those considered outsiders, including Trump, Carson, Cruz and Fiorina, as well as those considered a bridge between the outsiders and the establishment, like Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Huckabee, Bobby Jindal and Rick Santorum, were faring better on Facebook and Twitter than their establishment counterparts. Santorum had the lowest number of Facebook Likes, at 265, 810 followers – not far off from Jeb Bush. If presidential candidates were decided exclusively based upon grassroots support, without major donors to prop up establishment candidates, they’d be in trouble.

The article also notes how some of these outsiders, such as Ben Carson, actually increased the number of their “likes” immediately after they has said something that the press had called a miscue or a mistake and which they thought would end their campaign. Instead, they gained strength on Facebook.

As I’ve said for months, as soon as the real voting begins Jeb Bush will vanish. The Republican voter does not want another Bush, no matter how much money and organization he has. They also do not want a Kasich, a Graham, a Christie, or a Pataki, all of whom have demonstrated their willingness to abandon conservative ideas at the drop of a hat. Instead, the voters want someone not part of the Washington machine who will be willing to change things there. These data makes this fact quite clear.

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Curiosity’s future path

9:07 am

Looking up Mt Sharp

Cool image time! The Curiosity science team has produced another panorama of Mount Sharp and the regions that the rover will soon traverse.

This composite image looking toward the higher regions of Mount Sharp was taken on September 9, 2015, by NASA’s Curiosity rover. In the foreground — about 2 miles (3 kilometers) from the rover — is a long ridge teeming with hematite, an iron oxide. Just beyond is an undulating plain rich in clay minerals. And just beyond that are a multitude of rounded buttes, all high in sulfate minerals. The changing mineralogy in these layers of Mount Sharp suggests a changing environment in early Mars, though all involve exposure to water billions of years ago. The Curiosity team hopes to be able to explore these diverse areas in the months and years ahead. Further back in the image are striking, light-toned cliffs in rock that may have formed in drier times and now is heavily eroded by winds.

They have adjusted the colors, adding blue, so that things look as they would on Earth, in order to help the geologists understand what they are looking at.

Be sure and click on the link. The full resolution image is quite amazing. Like mountains on Earth, from a distance things look a lot simpler than they do once you get there. The slopes of Mount Sharp are complex and rugged, and will be a big challenge for Curiosity to traverse.

Moreover, this rough terrain illustrates that the Martian surface has, like Earth, been significantly shaped by erosion. The surface we see here is not the surface produced by the impact that produced the crater. It has been reshaped and eroded over many eons by many later processes, including wind and water.

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Republicans investigate global warming scientists who demanded skeptics be prosecuted

8:41 am

Turnabout is fair play? The lead signer of a letter from global warming scientists demanding the Obama administration investigate and prosecute corporations and scientists who express skepticism of human-caused global warming are now being investigated themselves.

Last week, Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX), the chairman of the science panel of the House of Representatives, announced plans to investigate a nonprofit research group led by climate scientist Jagadish Shukla of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He is the lead signer of a letter to White House officials that urges the use of an antiracketeering law to crack down on energy firms that have funded efforts to raise doubts about climate science.

In a 1 October letter, Smith asked Shukla, who is director of the independent Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES) in Rockville, Maryland, to preserve all of the “email, electronic documents, and data” that the institute has created since 2009. Smith’s panel soon may be asking for those documents, the letter suggests.

This is not good news and illustrates the truly poisonous culture we now live in. The original demand that skeptics be prosecuted was horrible. To respond by considering prosecution of global warming scientists is just as bad.

The solution to the debate about climate is to do research, to openly challenge the theories and claims of either side with facts. Attacking those with whom you disagree gets us no closer to the truth, and in fact hinders that effort significantly.

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Facebook to provide internet access to Africa

4:57 pm

The competition heats up: Using an Israeli communications satellite built by the European satellite company Eutelsat and slated to be launched by SpaceX in 2016, Facebook will provide internet service to the African continent.

Under a partnership announced Monday, Facebook and European satellite operator Eutelsat will buy all of the broadband capacity on the AMOS-6 satellite owned by Israeli company Spacecom. The mission has no confirmed launch date, with SpaceX still recovering from a Falcon 9 launch failure in June, but the partners expect the satellite to begin service in the second half of 2016, according to a press release.

What I like about this is the number of companies involved, all trying to make money, with Facebook the newcomer to the space industry. And the more the merrier, I say!

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School officials ashamed of the U.S.

9:04 am

Insane: High school administrators Wyoming canceled the annual “America Pride Day” celebration because they thought it would offend some students.

Jackson Hole High activities director (and assistant principal) Mike Hansen said he favored canceling “America Pride Day” because some students may not feel American and, thus, could feel “targeted and singled out by this day.” “Maybe they moved here last week. Maybe they moved here last month,” Hansen told the News&Guide, referencing the students who enjoy free education and much else in the shadow of a world-class ski resort. “We’re trying to balance many different things here,” the activities director added. “We’re trying to be inclusive and safe, make everyone feel welcome.”

What makes this story even more interesting is that the student body revolted against the decision.

In response to a decision by school officials to replace a previously-held “America Pride Day” with “College Day” as part of this year’s homecoming festivities, a large group of senior students and some juniors protested by bedecking themselves with American flag capes, American flag headbands, American flag shorts and all manner of beautifully and garishly patriotic American flag ornamentation. After school, one kid also drove a diesel truck around the parking lot with a bunch of American flags waving in the breeze.

The goal of school administrators is to make new immigrants feel welcome in America, not to be ashamed of their country. There is a reason immigrants are here, and it is too enjoy the blessings of freedom. To be embarrassed by this suggests that these school officials should find another job.

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Government overpayments going up by billions

8:44 am

Government marches on! A GAO report has found that since 2003 the federal government has wasted almost a trillion dollars in improper overpayments, with the numbers increasing by 20% in 2014.

The GAO said three programs were most at fault: Medicare, Medicaid and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). These three government programs were responsible for a full three-quarters of the nearly $19 billion in erroneous payments the federal government made in fiscal 2014, the GAO said. “Improper payments remain a significant and pervasive government-wide issue,” the congressional watchdog unit warned.

The Earned Income Tax Credit program was the worst offender. The Internal Revenue Service estimated that the program erroneously handed out $17.7 billion worth of “improper” payments. That amounts to a whopping 27.2 percent of the total $65.2 billion in EITC refund checks that the IRS sent out in fiscal 2014. And that means the federal government is now fast approaching the day when one out of every three earned income tax credits is erroneous.

Medicare was nearly as bad. The program, which covers about 54 million elderly and disabled beneficiaries, incorrectly doled out $59.9 billion in fiscal 2014, which is about a tenth of its $603 billion budget. So, one out of every $10 that Medicare spent last year was erroneous, the GAO found. Medicaid made $17.5 billion in mistaken payments out of its $304 billion budget, for a nearly 6 percent error rate.

It is obvious that the solution to this government problem is to give the government more power and money. How else can they reduce this waste but by spending more money!

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A list of all smallsat launch rockets

8:29 am

Doug Messier has compiled a very interesting table showing all the known smallsat launch vehicles presently under construction or in operation.

Most of the operational rockets, such as Orbital ATK’s Minotaur, have turned out to be too expensive for their small payloads, and have not been very profitable. The new generation of rockets, however, have the chance of success, as they are all working to reduce the cost significantly. Keep your eye especially on Rocket Labs (which just signed a contract with Moon Express), Swiss Space Systems, Firefly Space Systems, and (dare I say it?) Virgin Galactic.

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France considers developing reusable first stage

12:57 pm

The competition heats up: Two French government aerospace agencies have announced that they are researching the development of a reusable first stage.

It is very unclear how this research will be applied, since Europe’s replacement for the Ariane 5 is being built by Airbus Safran and they have made it clear that they only intend to recover their rocket’s engines, not the entire first stage.

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ULA completes its 100th successful launch

12:52 pm

The competition heats up: In a rare private commercial launch, ULA’s Atlas 5 rocket put a Mexican communications satellite in orbit on Friday, the 100th successful launch for the company.

The company still faces the same problems it did before this launch: It is running out of Russian engines for the Atlas 5, Congress is not willing to give them permission to use more, and the cost competition from SpaceX is not going to let up.

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Moon Express buys launch contract

12:17 pm

The competition heats up: The leading private effort to win the Google Lunar X-Prize, Moon Express, has signed a contract with the smallsat launch company Rocket Labs for three launches.

Mountain View, California-based Moon Express plans to use the launches to send to the moon new, smaller versions of its MX-1 lunar lander. Two of the launches will take place in 2017, with a third to be scheduled. All three will use Rocket Lab’s Electron small launch vehicle, whose first flight is scheduled for no earlier than late 2015 from New Zealand. – See more at: http://spacenews.com/moon-express-buys-rocket-lab-launches-for-lunar-missions/#sthash.J1hEuCp3.dpuf

Rather than piggyback on the major launch of big payload, which would deny them any control over launch dates, they have signed with a new and as yet unproved small rocket company. The result? Not only do we have the chance of getting our first privately built lander on the Moon, the contract jumpstarts a new rocket company designed to put small payloads into space.

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It wasn’t just an asteroid that killed the dinosaurs

11:49 am

Scientists have now obtained enough solid data to confirm that the large extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was caused not just by the Yucatan asteroid impact but also by the gigantic volcanic event in India called the Deccan Traps.

The researchers said the asteroid strike occurred 66.04 million years ago, plus or minus about 30,000 years. They said eruptions in a region called the Deccan Traps were already underway at a lower intensity but dramatically accelerated after the asteroid strike as if the powerful impact triggered it. The dating method they used found this acceleration began within 50,000 years of the impact, but it could have been in the mere days, months or years afterward. “Within measurement error, they’re simultaneous,” said volcanologist Loÿc Vanderkluysen of Philadelphia’s Drexel University. “The two processes in tandem caused the extinctions,” added Paul Renne, director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center and a University of California, Berkeley geologist, who led the study in the journal Science.

Though many planetary scientists have discounted the Deccan Traps for decades, paleontologists have tended to favor it as a major factor in the extinction. This new study suggests that both were involved, which was the theory held by most of the more reasonable scientists in both fields. While many liked to push one or the other theory in the press, the better scientists considered both a possible factor and have been working to determine this possibility.

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Charon in color

11:39 am

Charon

The New Horizons science team has released new high resolution images of Pluto’s moon Charon, including the global enhanced color view on the right.

High-resolution images of the Pluto-facing hemisphere of Charon, taken by New Horizons as the spacecraft sped through the Pluto system on July 14, and transmitted to Earth on Sept. 21, reveal details of a belt of fractures and canyons just north of the moon’s equator. This great canyon system stretches across the entire face of Charon, more than a thousand miles, and probably around onto Charon’s far side. Four times as long as the Grand Canyon, and twice as deep in places, these faults and canyons indicate a titanic geological upheaval in Charon’s past. “It looks like the entire crust of Charon has been split open,” said John Spencer, deputy lead for GGI at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “In respect to its size relative to Charon, this feature is much like the vast Valles Marineris canyon system on Mars.”

The team has also discovered that the plains south of the canyon, informally referred to as Vulcan Planum, have fewer large craters than the regions to the north, indicating that they are noticeably younger. The smoothness of the plains, as well as their grooves and faint ridges, are clear signs of wide-scale resurfacing.

In many ways these images remind me of an upside-down Mars, with the smooth lower plains in the south instead of the north. Obviously, the causes on Charon are going to be significantly different than those on Mars.

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Vostochny launch building built to the wrong size

8:37 am

Government marches on! The Russians have just discovered that their Soyuz 2 rocket does not fit in the building just finished at their new spaceport at Vostochny.

The cutting-edge facility was meant be ready for launches of Soyuz-2 rockets in December, but an unidentified space agency of a of a told the TASS news agency of a of a late Thursday that the rocket would not fit inside the assembly building where its parts are stacked and tested before launch. The building “has been designed for a different modification of the Soyuz rocket,” the source said, according to news website Medusa, which picked up the story from TASS.

The rocket had just been delivered to Vostochny for assembly, so this report, though unconfirmed at this time, fits well with current events.

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NASA pulls funding from private asteroid hunter

10:57 pm

Because of a failure to meet its developmental deadlines, NASA has cut its ties with the privately funded Sentinel satellite, designed to spot 90% of all near Earth asteroids that might pose a threat to the Earth.

The problem for the B612 Foundation, the private company committed to building Sentinel, is that they haven’t clearly laid out a way any investors could make money from the satellite. Thus, they have so far raised only $1.6 million from private sources. They need almost half a billion to build it, according to their own budget numbers.

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Congress places additional limits on Russian rocket engine use

10:48 pm

Bad news for ULA and the Atlas 5: A defense bill approved by the Congressional negotiators has placed further limits on the number of Russian rocket engines ULA can use in future Atlas 5 government launches.

The bill, which still faces an Obama veto, only allows ULA to use 9 more Russian engines. The company however says it needs to have at least 18 available to keep its ability to launch government payloads while it develops its new Vulcan rocket.

Read the whole article. The political complexity of this whole situation does not bode well for ULA or its Vulcan rocket. Too many players with too many conflicting goals appear to make it difficult for the company to push the development forward efficiently.

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